Another Decade In the Making

It is amazing how quickly a decade can fly by when you’re busy.

I never understood that until I had kids.  When you’re younger time moves so slowly that you think it will never pass at all.  You wake up on Monday morning, spend three weeks in school, and the calendar insists that it’s not even lunch yet.  Decades?  Might as well be millennia.

But then you have children of your own, and they are never the same from one moment to another.  They start out small and squally, and suddenly they’re up and running around with agendas of their own, and then just as suddenly they’re actual people with whom you can have actual conversations that don’t revolve around keeping them from sticking kitchen utensils into outlets, trash cans, or the cat, and you have no recollection at all of the intervening stages other than the logical certainty that there must have been some of them.

How does that happen?

Lauren turned ten today.  She is now officially a double-digit girl, into her second decade on this planet and waiting for it to turn into exactly what she feels it ought to be.  She’s been looking forward to this since, oh, early November of last year.  Lauren is not one to stand on the moment – she looks forward, relentlessly forward.

Lauren’s birthday is a huge thing for her, much more so than our own birthdays are to the rest of us in the family.  I’ve forgotten my own birthday more times than I’ve remembered it over the last thirty years or so - and likely would continue to forget it except that every year now it appears in my Facebook feed and people kindly write things on my page when it does - but for Lauren her birthday is the best and most important day of the year.  We’ve been getting reminders of this day for weeks.  She wrote it on the calendar.  The first thing she did when I woke her up for school this morning was flash ten fingers at me, to let me know how old she was now.  It’s a pretty big deal.  

The fact that it’s Halloween is just extra. 

Kim and the girls carved their pumpkins last night while I was teaching my night class, so I didn’t get to see them until today.  They were impressive, really.

Lauren’s friend Claire came over after school to go trick-or-treating in our neighborhood this year, and after dinner they all got into their costumes.

It was a brisk night, clear and pleasant, and we went from house to house gathering up treats of varying descriptions.  Not many houses had their porch lights on this year for some reason, but enough did that the girls all made a good haul.

And then, after I returned from taking Claire home, the UPS man came by with Lauren’s birthday presents from us, which Kim had actually remembered to order (versus my track record, which often leads to birthday presents given in entirely different seasons).

We’re having her birthday party this weekend, but that’s no reason not to be happy now.

Happy birthday, Lauren. 

Hurricane Memories

It was a beautiful fall day here in Wisconsin – blue skies, crisp air, temperatures in the low 50s, the sort of day that you hope for when the calendar turns toward the latter part of the year and the leaves stop being green.  It was a lovely day.  This felt sort of odd, really.

Like a lot of people, I’ve spent most of today on various websites and television stations watching Hurricane Sandy head directly at the Northeast Corridor.  I have friends and family in the path of this storm – they’re all safe and sound, last I checked in with them – and I recognize the locations of many of the storm photos that are making the rounds on the internet.  I’ve been there, in happier weather.

There may not be much there, there, anymore.  That’s a sobering thought.

I spent an evening in a hurricane once, when I was in college.  It wasn’t nearly as severe as this one, fortunately, but it was an experience.  And really, that’s what blogs are for, writing down experiences.

Hurricane Gloria hit Philadelphia in September of 1985, at the beginning of my sophomore year at Penn.  We were pretty excited by the prospect, actually.  Hurricanes don’t hit Philadelphia very often and we were all young and indestructible.  That the university decided to cancel classes the next day – something that never happened again while I was there – only added to the anticipation.

But first, we had a job to do.

I had met Jack a few weeks before, at one of those interminable mixers they have at the beginning of school years when the RAs are trying to get all the new people in the dorms to say hi to one another.  We were each assigned a nonsense sound (“booka-booka” in our case) and told to find whoever had the matching sound.  Conversation ensued.  We eventually ended up being roommates for the next four years – unofficially that first year, officially the next two, and off campus the year after that.  We were groomsmen in each other’s weddings.  We’re still friends today.  So I suppose the RAs scored with that one.

One of the things we found out about each other fairly early is that we were both musicians and liked a lot of the same stuff.  We also discovered that Rob, another new member of the dorm whom we met later, shared those qualities as well.  We spent some evenings that month playing together.  College dorms are wonderful places for musicians, in large part because they’ll put up with just about any level of talent as long as you’re having a good time.  We had a very good time.

Eventually we formed an actual band, with a name and everything, and we’d play down at a bar in Center City, which was interesting considering none of us could legally walk into the place.

Penn liked to put a lot of entrepreneurial initiative into the hands of its students, and this is how our friend James ended up running a coffeehouse in the student union, six blocks down Spruce Street from our dorm.  James was always looking for acts, and at one point he must have asked Jack to play.  Jack agreed, thinking he’d get up and play three or four songs and let the other acts do the rest.

It turned out there were no other acts.

So Jack rounded up Rob and me and we rehearsed a few songs together – enough to bull our way through a coffeehouse gig, anyway – and we were set to go.

We were booked for the night Gloria hit.  It was our first show.

It wasn’t raining at all when we left to walk down to the student union.  As the keyboard player, I didn’t have to carry anything.  Jack and Rob had guitars.  Jack also had a harmonica on a mount so he could play it without using his hands, and he gave us a few tunes on the way down.  It was a pleasant walk, really.

We got set up, and waited for the coffeehouse to open for business.

By that time, however, it had started to rain.  Sheets of rain.  Buckets of rain.  Driving, howling rain.

So there wasn’t much of a crowd, is what I’m saying.  But we had a grand time playing everything we knew and a few things we sort of knew and one or two songs we really didn’t know very well at all to the half dozen or so students who had gotten stranded there.  It felt sort of conspiratorial, being there while the storm went on around us, and not having so many people for our first concert was actually kind of nice.

James, however, recognized a failing business model when he saw one, and eventually he decided that it was time to close.  He paid us in pastries – the only time we were ever paid as a band, as far as I can recall – and told us to go home.

This, it turned out, was harder than it looked.

We walked over to the big doors that fronted onto Spruce Street and looked out across the way to the hospital, which we were sure had been there just a few hours ago.  You couldn’t really tell now, with the rain driving down so hard.  Penn had a student van service, and when we called to get picked up they told us it would be sometime in the next four hours or so.  This struck us as sub-optimal.

So we went down into the basement where there were restaurants and managed to talk our way into a few plastic trash bags.  Those Jack and Rob used to seal up their guitar cases.  We would dry off, but guitars get damaged.  You have to have priorities, as a musician.

Fully prepared, we ventured into the storm.

Jack had planned to play his harmonica on the way back but one intake of breath had left it waterlogged, so he put it away.

The winds were gusty but not yet hurricane strength, or even tropical storm strength.  But it was raining.  Oh, sweet dancing monkeys on a stick was it raining.  You couldn’t see across the street.  You could barely see the buildings on your own side of the street. 

I have never in my life, before or since, been that wet, not even while swimming.  It was a penetrating rain, a driving rain, the kind of rain that made breathing tricky and felt like it was hammering against your skin without bothering to pass through your clothes.  It was the Platonic ideal of wet.

We walked for six blocks in that, singing at the top of our lungs every song we could think of that had the words “rain” or “sun” in the title, sometimes repeatedly.

I still, to this day, am not entirely sure how we made it back to the dorm, but we did.  We squelched into the lobby to the astonished stares of our fellow residents and continued on up to our respective rooms, laughing all the while.

And sure enough, eventually we dried off.

That turned out to be the worst of the storm, oddly enough.  They might as well have had classes the next day. 

But we had our story by then.

Sunrise, Sunset

Is it even possible to listen to ABBA and not sing along?

The correct answer to that question is “no,” by the way.   Nor is it really possible to listen to “Dancing Queen” without doing the piano motions with your hands, even in heavy interstate traffic.  ABBA is the fourth-largest cause of minor traffic accidents in the US that way.

Tonight was the great ABBA Sing-In, down at the performing arts center here in Our Little Town.  It was kind of like a Messiah sing-in, only with sequins and spandex.  Not on me, personally – there isn’t enough whiskey in the barrel for me to stuff myself into anything spandex, not even as a negative example – but for others in attendance, it was the uniform.

It was a fundraiser for someone – I’m not sure who, really, but I suppose that is less important than the fact that about a hundred people turned out for what was in all likelihood a good cause and sang along.  They showed the movie version of Mamma Mia, set the DVD player to show the song lyrics on the big screen on stage (though where was the bouncing meatball to show us what words we were on?) and let us have at it.

It was a lot of fun.

For those of you who haven’t seen it or the musical on which it is based, the movie is a charming little story of a bride and three men she’s invited to her wedding, one of whom is her father though which one nobody – least of all the mother of the bride – knows.  Complications ensue, as you would expect, and the ending is suitably, if somewhat unconventionally, happy, as you know it will be, grim endings not being a hallmark of musical theater.  I suppose the plot isn’t all that important, really – mostly it’s an excuse to string together any number of ABBA songs into what is, by the standards of musical theater, a surprisingly coherent narrative.  But tonight it stuck with me.

The thing about ABBA songs is that when you’re singing along in the car you tend to focus on the bubblegum pop aspects of the songs – the catchy little hooks, the tight harmonies, the danceable rhythms, and so on.  Those are fun, but you can’t really build a story around things like that.  You can’t have a real story with just cheerful stuff.  The only reason the story works as well as it does is that there is a surprisingly dark edge to a lot of those songs.

Have you ever really listened to “The Winner Takes It All”?  It’s a very bitter song, in a sad and resigned sort of way.

The story of the movie is, of course, the wedding.  It’s all about the wedding.  Everything circles around the wedding, leads up to the wedding, follows logically from the wedding.  And at some point Meryl Streep – who really can sing, oddly enough, as anyone who has listened to the Philadelphia Chickens CD can tell you – gets lost in the moment and ends up singing one of ABBA’s less-well-known songs.

Schoolbag in hand, she leaves home in the early morning
Waving goodbye, with an absent-minded smile
I watch her go with a surge of that well-known sadness
And I have to sit down for a while.
The feeling that I’m losing her forever
And without really entering her world
I’m glad whenever I can share her laughter
That funny little girl

Slipping through my fingers all the time
I try to capture every minute
The feeling in it
Slipping through my fingers all the time
Do I really see what’s in her mind
Each time I think I’m close to knowing
She keeps on growing
Slipping through my fingers all the time

I was sitting next to Tabitha during the show, and part of me wanted to lean over and say, “You wonder why I take so many pictures?  That’s why.  You won't understand that for a long time, not really, but now you know.”

The moments come and go so quickly, and so soon I am older and they have vanished into the past.  My children grow up and past me before I even know they’re moving.  It’s the way things work.  It’s the way things always work.  That’s how it goes.

And I get to sing along.

I just know that when Tabitha and Lauren get married, I am going to be such a wreck. 

Periodic Cupcakes

Well, I hope you have had a happy National Chemistry Week, out there wherever you are.

Nerd holidays are just the best of the minor holidays.  You can keep President’s Day, which has degenerated into an excuse to sell things to people who didn’t get what they wanted on Valentine’s Day.  Columbus Day just gets people angry these days, either because of the consequences of the European discovery of the western hemisphere or because of the modern reaction to those consequences – my liberal and conservative friends spent the whole day this year making snotty Facebook posts at each other, which takes a bit of the shine off for those of us who just want to be happy for a man who had no idea where he was going, no idea what he found, never did figure out where he’d been, and still managed to get a holiday named after him.  And Arbor Day?  Don’t make me laugh.

But National Chemistry Week is a time for people to join together and celebrate science in all its glory, and the fact that there are just way too many people in this country who think that’s controversial is just not going to make my world all wilty. 

Science!  Ja!

And there are just so many ways to celebrate!

Tuesday, for example – 10/23 – was National Mole Day, which I believe is mostly to do with Avogadro’s Number and nothing to do with rodents, although I’m not really sure about that, come to think of it.  My chemistry education was somewhat abbreviated.  The last time I actually sat in a chemistry class was sometime during Reagan’s first term in office and mostly what I remember from that class is that there is no recognized unit of measurement known as “yeah, about that much.”  This came as rather a shock to me and my lab partner, and is probably the reason my teacher retired not long afterward.  You can only dodge those bullets for so long.

I'm not really sure what one does to celebrate National Mole Day, either.  Count really high?  Apparently a mole of sugar is about 342 grams, which works out to quite a few candy bars.  Gluttony is always an option when it comes to holidays, so perhaps that would do.

Fortunately this idea did not occur to me at the time.

National Chemistry Week is a big sort of deal for Kim, her being a chemist and all, so this year she decided that since she was no longer chained to an administrative post and was actually back in a classroom teaching chemistry she would celebrate it in style.

So last weekend I saw few unusual items on the shopping list as I ran around the grocery store.  Those translated into Kim, Tabitha and Lauren spending most of Sunday baking cupcakes.  Mounds of cupcakes.  Gallons, quarts and pints of cupcakes, all of which ended up in the freezer until last night.

I teach on Thursday nights this semester, so I missed last night's Great Frosting Party.  Apparently if you mix those supermarket tubs of frosting half and half with Cool Whip you can cover an entire house with a fine layer of sugar, thus ensuring that the cupcakes - being part of the house at the time - will be covered as well.  Who knew?  And once that detail has been taken care of, you can then write the symbols and numbers of all of the elements on the cupcakes in a different color of frosting, one cupcake per element.  And then you can arrange them all into a periodic table.

A periodic table of cupcakes! 

Bow down before our nerdosity, peasants!

Of course, this doesn't mean much sitting on the dining room table - you have to get it to the proper audience, and the logistics of that get tricky.  There’s about 120 elements or so, depending on how many you want to count.  They’re arranged in a sort of a grid, 18 wide and 7 high, plus 2 more rows underneath.  Each cupcake is about 2.5 inches in diameter.  Put them all into boxes, cart them to campus without crushing any of them or coating the inside of the car with the same fine layer of sugar currently coating the house, get them out of the car and into the classroom where you previously have remembered to ask Maintenance to find a table (yes, you have!) and … well, that’s some logistics right there.

Not to worry.

Lauren was off school today thanks to teacher conferences, so she came in to help.

 Happy National Chemistry Week!

The First Vote

I cast my first presidential ballot for Richard Nixon.

In my defense, I was six at the time.

My first grade teacher, Mrs. Berger, must have wanted us to feel like we were active citizens of the democracy in which we lived – a democracy that was rather less polarized than it is today, which is saying something considering this was 1972 and the Vietnam War was still going on.  We didn’t know much about any war.  Our parents were too old to be drafted, our siblings were too young, and the leafy suburb of Philadelphia we lived in was not really a hotbed of protest one way or the other.

Nevertheless, we knew there was an election coming.  You couldn’t avoid it, really.  Even first-graders pick up on things when there is no other option.  Everyone around us was talking about it.  The newspapers they used as teaching aides were full of the story.  You couldn’t even watch cartoons without seeing somebody prattling on about the matter.  Election!  Vote! 

I remember my teacher coming into class one day and announcing that we were indeed going to be voting for a presidential candidate.  We then spent the better part of a week discussing voting as a practice and an ideal – something I have endeavored always to live up to ever since – and what, precisely, a president was and why people would vote for one.

There are times when I think that last lesson needs to be taught more often.  The average American today looks at a president as an odd cross between a personal manservant, a blue-haired maiden aunt, a scapegoat for the world’s ills, and an omnipotent magician.

Most Americans look at God the same way, come to think of it.  No wonder our politics are so bizarre. 

We spent a while going over all that, and then it was time to cast our ballots.  We each got a slip of paper and were told to write our candidate’s name on it, fold it up carefully so nobody could see our choice, and slide it into the hole in the big cardboard box at the front of the class when we were done.  If we couldn’t remember who was running, we had only to look up at the board, where the two main candidates’ names were written in that unnaturally clear handwriting that primary-school teachers have: Richard Nixon; George McGovern.  Pick one.

There were twenty of us in that class, and as I recall it was a landslide victory for the incumbent – something along the order of 19-1.  Nixon’s the one!  Nixon’s the one!  Nixon’s the one we’d heard of before!

Thus we learned a valuable lesson about the importance of name-recognition in political campaigns.

It also taught us that just because something is familiar doesn’t mean it is necessarily worth supporting.  My next clear political memories all center on Watergate.

Oops.

But we had participated, and we were proud of having done so.  As by rights we should have been.  Your rights as a citizen depend on your responsibilities as a citizen, which is why you should be voting next month and why those who seek to suppress the vote of American citizens should be strung up by their tender bits until they apologize and the impediments they’ve enacted have been removed.

Go vote.  Your first-grade teacher would be proud.

A Curious Lack

I find I have nothing to say these days.

Perhaps it is just the middle of the semester and I am simply busy.  Too many assignments are coming in that need to be graded, and I’m one of those annoying professors who actually reads what students turn in and tries to make comments to indicate that I have, in fact, read what has been turned in – comments that, if taken seriously, would lead to better work being turned in.  I’m also teaching two of my classes in new formats, which means finding new break points for lectures and juggling exactly where specific elements fall (you can’t just start a discussion portion with 4 minutes left in a class, for example, not responsibly anyway).  It’s taking up a lot of mental energy just keeping up with things.

Don’t even ask what my desk looks like at home.  It’s rather unkempt even by my generous standards.

We’re also deep into the performing arts schedule down at Home Campus – this weekend we had a comedian perform, and not only was he funny but we actually got a decent crowd to hear him be funny.  I’m used to audiences I can count on my fingers and toes, but I would have had to have been quite a mutant indeed to do that for this house.  But we’re a small campus, and I’m the guy who does everything from hanging, focusing and running the lights to negotiating the contracts to putting the coffee and tea in the dressing room (with my teakettle from my office, of course).  It’s a lot to keep track of.

I’m also pretty maxed out on politics, which is all so many people want to talk about these days.  I am malevolently well-informed regarding the current state of American politics and see no use to becoming more so or discussing it further.  I said most of what I wanted to say earlier this month.  I could elaborate on it – as several commenters noted, there were things I had folded into the larger argument that sort of got lost in the folding process – but I find that even the prospect of doing so leaves me staring blankly into space for hours. 

So posting may be slow for a while. 

I’m sure I’ll get back up on top of things eventually.  I have too many opinions to keep my mouth shut for long.  I enjoy telling stories too much to abandon this little corner of the internet.  There are too many things I want to remember, and I store them here.  My family is well.  My friends call now and then and we have wonderful conversations.  I’m reading good books.  There’s a lot of things I’ll get around to saying eventually.

But if you’re wondering where the posts are and why I’m not keeping to my “every-other-day” goals, well, now you know.

Fortune Telling

“Money is the root of all evil, and a man needs roots.”

You learn the oddest things from fortune cookies. 

Every so often some of the folks down at Home Campus go in for takeout Chinese.  There’s a place nearby – actually not all that far from home – that has a nice deal for lunch as part of their normal menu, and if you work in education they’ll throw in a soda.  It’s not just a can, either – it’s one of those bottles that make you seriously question the long-term health of the American republic. One person is supposed to drink all that?  Okaaaaay.  It will save the invaders time when we all just keel over in advance.

I always get the General Tso Chicken, and I’ve discovered recently that they actually have a menu setting above “Extra Spicy.”  If you tell them “Burn Your Mouth,” they will actually make it spicy enough to register on my non-midwestern taste buds.  Yes, I know that to aficionados of genuine Chinese cuisine such a meal is enough to make them gag on their stinky tofu (“chou doufu” – this is a real thing), but you have to realize that a) I am in Wisconsin, where genuine Chinese food is rarely to be found and not likely to be ordered much in the event it is found, and b) I like General Tso Chicken and therefore don’t care whether it is genuine Chinese cuisine or not.

Sometimes it’s enough just to be tasty.

We gathered in one of the conference rooms which was not, at that moment, being used for any conferencing, and set to eating.  And talking, occasionally about work-related matters.  And generally hanging out.  So in the end I suppose you could say it was a form of conference after all.

I wonder if I should put in for overtime.

Nah.  I don’t get overtime when I’m actually working overtime.

My fortune cookie was the only one with a smart-alec message.  Everyone else’s was in the more traditional vein – “You will meet with great success,” and so on.  I ended up giving it to George, our economics professor, because it seemed the sort of thing that he would appreciate.